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Lot Essay
Glowing with light and warmth, Bonnard's Terrasse dans le midi is a colourist extravaganza, a sumptuous visual hymn to life and beauty. He has created an enticingly paradoxical image, a fashionable scene of bucolic promenade from the mid-1920s. In it, we see walkers from a unexpected viewpoint, saturated with the heat and light of the South of France. The deep, blue of the sky draws the viewer in with its lushness and lapis-like intensity. In the 1920s, Bonnard had already honed his skills as a colourist in the north of France, even before his fascination with the South flowered. Recent scholarship has made much of the contrast that Bonnard explored in his paintings between the North and the South, and between realism and idealism.
In mid-1920s Bonnard bought a villa he called Le Bosquet at Le Cannet which provided him with a permanent source of inspiration. Situated above Cannes, on the Côte d’Azur, the house was surrounded by lush vegetation that could be seen from the house. Both the villa and the town itself offered the artist a wide array of subjects to paint, resulting in powerful, boldly coloured compositions. As Jörg Zutter wrote: ‘By 1931 Le Bosquet was Bonnard’s favourite place to work and in 1939 it became the couple’s permanent home. The house and its surroundings provided an ideal work environment for the artist, who continued to paint studies of Marthe, often standing in the bathroom or lying in the tub. He also painted still lifes, self-portraits, interiors and the views onto the countryside from different windows and doors’ (J. Zutter in Pierre Bonnard: Observing Nature, Canberra, 2003, p. 61).
As a landscape painter, Bonnard was always fascinated by light and colour, and in the present work he beautifully rendered the unique quality of light in the Mediterranean. As James Elliott observed: ‘Bonnard was essentially a colorist. He devoted his main creative energies to wedding his sensations of color from nature to those from paint itself – sensations which he said thrilled and even bewildered him. Perceiving color with a highly developed sensitivity, he discovered new and unfamiliar effects from which he selected carefully, yet broadly and audaciously’ (J. Elliott, in Bonnard and His Environment, New York, 1964, p. 25).
In mid-1920s Bonnard bought a villa he called Le Bosquet at Le Cannet which provided him with a permanent source of inspiration. Situated above Cannes, on the Côte d’Azur, the house was surrounded by lush vegetation that could be seen from the house. Both the villa and the town itself offered the artist a wide array of subjects to paint, resulting in powerful, boldly coloured compositions. As Jörg Zutter wrote: ‘By 1931 Le Bosquet was Bonnard’s favourite place to work and in 1939 it became the couple’s permanent home. The house and its surroundings provided an ideal work environment for the artist, who continued to paint studies of Marthe, often standing in the bathroom or lying in the tub. He also painted still lifes, self-portraits, interiors and the views onto the countryside from different windows and doors’ (J. Zutter in Pierre Bonnard: Observing Nature, Canberra, 2003, p. 61).
As a landscape painter, Bonnard was always fascinated by light and colour, and in the present work he beautifully rendered the unique quality of light in the Mediterranean. As James Elliott observed: ‘Bonnard was essentially a colorist. He devoted his main creative energies to wedding his sensations of color from nature to those from paint itself – sensations which he said thrilled and even bewildered him. Perceiving color with a highly developed sensitivity, he discovered new and unfamiliar effects from which he selected carefully, yet broadly and audaciously’ (J. Elliott, in Bonnard and His Environment, New York, 1964, p. 25).